Just like it happens with members of other political parties, there are some differences of opinion among libertarians. But we all agree that what we advocate is much better for everyone than what other parties advocate.
Some of our differences are about how much we want to reduce the powers of government, and some go as far as eliminating it altogether. Others are about specific issues, such as abortion. This document emphasizes what we advocate in areas where there is a strong libertarian consensus, though not necessarily unanimity. And it goes beyond stating what we advocate. It also uses examples of how we would implement what we advocate, and the personal, social, economic and political benefits that come from that.
I. Our Guiding Libertarian Principles
We are for a limited government that respects individual rights and responsibilities. Our rights only end where they interfere with the rights of others. And we are opposed to the first use of force, but relish our right to self-defense.
Examples: Rights Based on Our Guiding Libertarian Principles
We support the right of gays to marry or transsexuals to change sex, as much the right of businesses to decide what to sell, who to sell to and its price; and the right to gamble, to decide what to buy and consume, and the rights in our Constitution, such as to a jury trial, free speech and equal protection of the law. And we believe that actions that do not harm anyone else should not be a crime.
We are concerned that our government has, at times, violated (a) some of our Constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, equal protection of the law, and (b) many of the additional rights that we believe in.
We support these rights because we are convinced that individuals, when respecting the rights of others, and acting voluntarily, make better decisions in business, personal relationships, health care and other aspects of their life, than does the governments using the force of law.
When this force is used to tell people: who they can love, what they can read, what they can eat or drink smoke or inject, what they can buy or sell, and at what price, the consequences are worse for our freedom, economic condition, health, happiness, and all that we value.
II. Limited Government
Government is most effective when limited to where it is most needed, such as, (a) legislating a clear and enforceable definition of our personal and property rights, (b) courts to interpret the laws, (c) national defense, (d) police protection, and (e) providing the infrastructure of some common areas, such as some streets and their lighting.
Economic Rights Under a Limited Government
Respect for Property Rights
The legal definition of property rights should protect owners' ability to use the property for their benefit, and prevent their use in ways that harm others.
For example, owners should have the right to exclude intruders from their homes or some customers from their businesses. But acts like driving a car recklessly or throwing garbage on other people's property and polluting the air should be penalized by law.
The right to buy and sell property, including labor, should not be restricted in any way, and no property should be taken by government through eminent domain.
Therefore, we oppose laws that set minimum wages or maximum rent, require a minimum size of lots to reduce density, and all other laws that control how voluntary transactions among consenting adults are conducted. Those laws benefit a few with more political influence, at the expense of others, rather than prevent harm to others.
And those laws also do harm, such as: (a) to the unskilled workers who cannot find a job because minimum wages are higher than what employers are willing to pay, or (b) to the people who cannot afford a home because density-reducing regulations also reduce their supply and increase their price.
Separation of Business from the State
All products and services for which private individuals or companies can earn money from their sale should be provided by a private business, not a government.
By nature, a government running a business does not have the incentives to keep costs down, innovate and make the product more useful to consumers. This is because government employees and managers (unlike private owners) do not share in the benefits from these actions, and the politicians create these businesses only to favor their re-election.
Example: Amtrak
Amtrak tries to spread out its passenger rail service among the most states and congressional district as possible, in order to get as many politicians in Congress to vote for subsidies to it. The politicians can then claim to their voters that they brought them the rail service, which helps them get re-elected.
But this also requires spreading out the rail service to many areas that have few rider, resulting in low revenues. This causes large losses for Amtrak, requiring taxpayers subsidies so it can continue operating. Every year Amtrak promises to break even in three years, but this never happens.
The Amtrak example illustrates the problems with, government ownership of business like electric power plants, passenger railroads, the air traffic control system, postal service, and home damage insurance, make us all poorer. Due to their waste of resources that increases their costs, they get subsidized with our tax money so they can continue to operate.
Therefore, government ownership of business like electric power plants, passenger railroads, the air traffic control system, postal service, and home damage insurance, make us all poorer. Due to their waste of resources that increases their costs, they get subsidized with our tax money so they can continue to operate.
Germany, the UK, France, Portugal and Japan have privatized their post offices, New Zealand, Germany, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom privatized their air traffic control system. Chile, France, Mexico, Canada, Italy, the UK, India and Bangladesh have some privately built roads paid by tolls, not taxes.
And in Denmark 65% of its municipalities contract with private fire services companies, while in 19 countries (including many US states) parents can get tax credits or government vouchers used to pay for private schools.
GermanPrivatePostOffice UKPrivatePostOffice FrenchPrivatePostOffice WorldPostalServicePrivatization USAirTrafficControlPrivatization PrivateAirTrifficControl PrivateHighways PrivateHighwaysInChile PrivateFireControlService PrivateSchoolChoice
Privatizations are not "radical" or "impractical" libertarian ideas. They are proven effective ways to reduce government waste of labor, land and capital resources, and improve services.
No Legal Advantages or Disadvantages to Particular Businesses
We oppose federal, state or local laws to subsidize businesses (including farms), different tax treatment for different industries, import duties to protect our businesses from foreign competition, plus business and occupational licenses that increase the cost of a new business or individuals to enter an industry
These laws, and many others like it, protect some businesses from competition by others, creating privileges for some and reducing opportunities for others. We consider these to be a violation of our constitutional provision and libertarian principle of “equal protection of the law”.
Subsidies to businesses replace the people's choices of what to buy with the government's choice of which products they get to buy from which company; all paid out of taxation, reducing personal income, and denying consumers how to spend that money, while reducing their incentive to work and invest.
Subsidies and tax favoritism for some businesses make us poorer because they replace market competition that cuts costs and rewards innovation with dependency on favors from the government. It also leads to redirecting resources to hiring more lobbyist to influence the government.
Tariffs are Import taxes to incentivize US companies to sell products that cost more to make here than elsewhere. They cost more because they uses more valuable resources to make them here than it costs to import them. These resources could have been better used by other US industries that are competitive in word markets. This waste of resources to make products that cost more lowers our productivity, therefore our standard of living.
This waste of resources is the real damage by tariffs, not merely that they increases the price of the taxed import. An equal sales tax on all retail products also increases their prices, but does not waste our resources the way tariffs do. And tariffs also reduce the number of competitors in our country, when competition is the driver of productivity, innovation and cost reduction.
Subsidies, tariffs and privileged tax treatments are also unfair and a huge source of political corruption driven by contributions to the election campaigns of the politicians who favor them, by companies and unions that benefit at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. And their waste of resources reduce total real income. Therefore, they reduce the total income of those that pay their costs by more than they increase the total real income of the privileged few who benefit from them.
Unrestricted free trade, competition and freedom of choice for everyone keeps costs down and promotes progress through innovations, therefore raise our standard of living.
III. Ending The Welfare State
We also propose to phase out all government schemes that tax some to give money or "free" services to others, such as Social Security, Medicare, "welfare", and housing subsidies. Those benefits that are conditioned on being poor keep their recipients from trying to improve their employment and income, for fear of losing their payment. And this traps them in their poverty. And the parts of the welfare state that is not conditioned on poverty such as Social Security, Medicare and some of the subsidies to housing also reduce our standard of living for reasons illustrated in our example.
But, limiting our government with (a) respect for property rights, (b) privatization of government businesses, (c) an end to import duties, (d) restrictive licenses, (e) business favoritism (f) the welfare state, and (g) all laws that regulate or prohibit actions where no other person is harmed, reduce both the government waste of our resources and the burden of taxation.
And these changes will lead to a large increase in real income for all, which will allow almost everyone to pay for private alternatives to the free services provided by the welfare state.
This rise in income will reduce how much help the deserving poor will need and how much more they will be able to get from private charities and individuals to provide all the cash and free services needed.
Unfortunately, there are many people that have become dependent on getting cash or "free" services from the tax payers. So, during a transition period, most welfare state programs can only be ended gradually, to avoid major disruptions in people's lives.
There are too many welfare state schemes to show how they would all be phased out. But this example of one way to do that with Social Security, illustrates the principles that would be followed.
Example: Social Security
How Social Security Works
The minimum required age for a worker to get Social Security payments is 62 (regardless of whether or not the worker retires). The benefit payments come almost exclusively from the payroll taxes being paid by workers and their employers during the time that those older than 61 are receiving those payments. Very little of the payroll tax is saved to repay the workers when they reach the required age for receiving payments. Almost all is used to pay current Social Security beneficiaries.
The employer portion of the Social Security tax has the effect of reducing the demand for labor, therefore, reducing wages by the same amount as the tax. So, employees effectively pay for both their part and the employer part.
And Social Security is currently unsustainable because what it pays out is more than the payroll taxes it takes in. Therefore, the meager remaining funds that were saved are projected to be exhausted by 2034. After that, it will only be able to pay out about 75% of what it is paying now, all from current payroll tax revenues. This is a quote from the website of the Congressional Budget Office:
CBO projects that if Social Security outlays were limited to what is payable from annual revenues after the combined trust funds' exhaustion in fiscal year 2034, Social Security benefits would be 25 percent smaller than scheduled benefits in 2034.
Most of the money paid into Social Security is not saved or invested, it is used to pay current recipients. But this can only continue as long as its taxes on workers are high enough to pay the benefits to the recipients.
This is why we say that Social Security is a government Ponzi scheme:
If SS taxes become voluntary, workers will exit it in droves. Seeing how this would cut their future benefits, the rest of the workers will exit it in an avalanche. Current recipients would then lose most of the SS income they thought they were getting. This is what happens in a Ponzi scheme when its fraud is discovered. I does not happen in a government Ponzi scheme only because all workers are forced by law to pay into Social Security.
This Social Security deficit has only happened because politicians kept raising Social Security benefits more than its taxes, without any concern for the future. Now, the future is here, and what happens when a reporter asks a politician about what they would do about this deficit? They change the subject and, if it wouldn't look so ridiculous, they would hide under the table. If you need a reason to stop believing what our government promises, this is it.
The Most Important Reasons to End Social Security
The SS payroll tax (a) takes from workers what they would have saved for retirement, and (b) it promises payments to older people, reducing their need to save for retirement.
Since Social Security saves very little of its payroll tax revenues, using most of it to pay current beneficiaries, it does not make up for the decline in the workers' savings, resulting in a net loss of savings to the economy.
And savings is the source of financing investments in business building, equipment and research on technology, which are the sources of the economic development that improves our standard of living. So this destruction of savings by Social Security makes us poorer.
In addition, if workers save what they now pay into Social Security, they would earn interest in bank accounts or buying bonds, or capital gains in the stock market. This increases the fund they will have for retirement, which can be used to buy a simple annuity that would pay more per month than Social Security.
Some have argued that Social Security is needed because some people are not financially responsible enough to save for retirement. The libertarian answer to that is this: (a) they can always continue working, instead of retiring, and some people do prefer that, and (b) the rest of the country should not have to sacrifice their standard of living to protect the irresponsible. This is a good example of the part of our Guiding Libertarian Principles that says: “We are for limited government, and individual rights and responsibilities”.
Phasing Out Social Security
- Currently, the Social Security monthly payments can start at age 62, and their amounts increase with the age when you start, up to age 70. This phasing out plan would move back this schedule of starting ages by one month every two months. After 10 years it would moved back 5 years, to start at age 67, after 20 years, it starts at 72 and after 40 at 82.
- Eventually there will not be anyone living long enough to get Social Security benefits. This approach allows people close to the starting age of benefits to continue working to save for some of the lost benefit years.
- Reduce Social Security payments to current recipients now to about 80% of current levels (which would have to be to 75% if we wait until 2034). The unsustainable level of Social Security benefits was caused by the politicians that set them so high. They have never dared to correct this, because Social Security recipients vote in greater proportion than the young.
- Replace the Consumer Price Index to adjust SS payments for inflation with the GDP deflator Index for personal consumption, since the CPI overstates inflation.
Of course, if we do nothing else, this plan also places a large burdens on (a) younger people who will have to continue paying payroll taxes for many years and never get anything back, and (b) older ones under 62 to 70, who will have their SS benefits postponed.
But, once we overcome the Social Security deficit, the push back of the starting age for paying these benefits will make it possible to use the resulting surplus to start gradually cutting the payroll tax, and eventually eliminate it. The tax cuts should be largest for younger people and diminish with age, since the youngest are the ones that will never get any social security payments.
Of course, there is no way out of the Social Security Ponzi scheme without some people losing something that they thought was coming to them, but did not exist because it was given to someone else. These people are: (a) the current recipients that paid into it, (b) the future recipients that paid and are paying into it and (c) maybe, the other tax payers that would bail them out, if we use that option.
They will all find out that some money they expected to get is not coming. This is what happens when a Ponzi scheme is discovered and crashes. All we can do is to spread the losses among all of those affected in some orderly and reasonable manner.
Social Security is structured as a Ponzi scheme that: (a) invites the politicians to raise benefits more than taxes, to buy votes, (b) reduces savings, investment, economic development and real income, and (c) makes it politically very difficult to unravel it. This is an example of why we cannot trust governments to create schemes that take money from some to give it to others.
IV. Out of Control Government
The Death Spiral of Debt
The growth of so many federal spending programs has been without enough increases in taxes to pay for them, resulting in more borrowing. And if its ability to borrow is lost through loss of credit, the federal government can always pay the deficit creating money.
Of course, creating money to pay for deficits will cause very high inflation, given the size of the deficits.
And the solution to this problem should not be tax increases either. Taxes cause their own damage, such as reducing incentives to work and invest, and the cost of collecting them.
In addition, the higher the tax rates, the greater is the amount of avoidance, evasion, shifting to untaxed or low-taxed activities and the collection costs. This is why, tax rate increases produce diminishing net returns of additional revenue. But the cuts in government spending that we suggest will eliminate waste, increasing our economy's productivity, thus our real income.
If nothing is done to end the deficit, our irresponsible increases in government spending will reach crisis proportions in future years.
Higher debt increases our interest payments and reduces our credit rating, which increases the interest rates the government has to pay, which further increases how much it has to spend on interest, which further increase the deficit and debt.
This death spiral of debt has been experienced by other countries, for example: recently by Greece and numerous times by Argentina.
In fact, Argentina experienced the last stages of its latest death spiral of debt in late 2023 with an inflation rate that reached 20% per month. The inflation was caused by creating money to pay for a very large government deficit. Borrowing was no longer possible because Argentina had lost all of its credit due to frequent defaults on its debt.
This resulted in the election of a libertarian President by a margin of 11 percentage points. He started his four-year term on December 10, 2023. Javier Milei made it very clear during his campaign that he plans to sell all of the government owned business and seriously cut government spending until spending equals tax revenues by December of 2024. He did it by January of 2024.
During the next four months, this stopped the creation of additional Argentine pesos, which started reducing the inflation rate, increased the value of defaulted Argentine debt from 18% of par to 60% of par and increased the value of the peso vs. the dollar by about 12%. The inflation rate has fallen from 20% per month in December to 8.8% in March, and is expected to continue falling.
Milei has also submitted to the Argentine Congress a long list of deregulation proposals. Despite a temporary recession created by his spending cuts Opinion surveys he retains a 55% approval rate, and that that most people believe they will be better off in one year, even though they are worse off than a year earlier.
This proves that, when a libertarian tells the people the truth about the temporarily painful recession that is needed to save their country from hyperinflation and more poverty, most voters understand and agree.
The numbers about our own growing death spiral of debt are shown in the Congressional Budget Office projections of federal spending, tax revenues, deficit and debt.
Congressional Budget Office Section: Consequences of High and Rising Federal Deb, and Table 1.1
Based on (a) assuming that current laws governing taxes and spending remain unchanged, and (b) real potential GDP (gross domestic product) grows annually by 1.8% during 2023 to 2032, 1.6% during 2033 to 2042, and 1.5% during 2043 to 2052:
The CBO shows how much federal spending, taxes and debt will rise between 2023 and the average of the years 2044 to 2053, as a percent of GDP:
Federal spending grows from 23.7% to 29.0%. and the federal deficit grows from 5.3% to 10.2%.
The debt owed by the US Treasury to the public (not to other government agencies) grows from 98% to 195%.
This projection is based on current tax and spending laws, but Congress has gotten into the habit of declaring frequent "emergencies" to be able to spend outside of its current laws. So the actual debt problem is certain to be worse than projected.
The 98% debt to GDP in 2023 is comparable to the same debt ratio in 1945, at the end of World War II, which of course, was a very expensive war. After that, this debt ratio declined to about 50% by the 1970's, and has been rising ever since.
And we are already feeling the consequences of the 98% debt to GDP ratio:
On August 2023, Fitch downgraded the US federal credit rating from triple A to double A, and on November 10, Moody's downgraded its triple A credit to “negative” from “stable.”
The United States government has a higher debt to GDP ratio than 156 out of 168 countries.
And US 10-Year Treasury yields, as of Nov 17 2023, were higher than those of 33 other countries, including Vietnam, China and Greece, not to mention Germany and Switzerland.
All of this indicates that our federal government has already entered the death spiral of debt. If nothing is done to cut the projected federal government spending and debt, bond market participants will require even higher interest rates on Treasury bonds, as their trust in our ability to pay back this debt will be increasingly questioned.
We can also expect political pressures on the Federal Reserve to buy back more US bonds with created money to reduce the debt. This will cause more inflation, which also increases interest rates, acts as a hidden tax on money and creates economic instability that discourages investments, just as it has been happening in Argentina.
The end result of this spiral will be a panic sale of US bonds that will lower the value of the dollar, making imports more expensive, lowering our real income and creating a financial crisis from loss of confidence, with unemployment rates comparable to at least the Great Recession.
And of course, the US is too big to be saved from this crisis by loans from the International Monetary Fund conditioned on cutting government spending (as it has done with Argentina, Greece and other countries).
V. Personal Rights Under a Limited Government
Under “Some Rights Based on Our Principles” above we stated this:
We support these rights because we are convinced that individuals, when respecting the rights of others, and acting voluntarily, make better decisions in business and personal relationships, health care and all other aspects of life than do governments.
When the force of government is used to tell people who they can love, what they can read, what they can eat or drink or smoke or inject, what they can buy or sell, or at what price, the consequences are worse for our economic well-being, our health, our happiness, our freedom and all that we value.
Example: The Right to Choose Our Drugs
Here, we concentrate on the right to choose our own drugs, as opposed to the prohibition of some drugs, because it exemplifies the value of all the personal rights we advocate. It was chosen as an example of how a government can ruin lives, precisely because it is one of our most controversial libertarian position among non-libertarians.
If you can understand why drug prohibition is such a destructive policy, you will see why the freedom of personal choice is the best policy for this and for everything else.
The Problem
We argue that making addictive drugs illegal has caused more harm than any that could come from making the wrong personal choice of drugs or dosage. These are the harms caused by drug prohibition:
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Prohibition of any substance leads to making it more concentrated in order to make it easier to smuggle. During alcohol prohibition bootleggers sold much more hard liquor than beer, and both with higher concentrations of alcohol. Since the 1970's the potency of marijuana has been highly increased by illegal growers through artificial selection of variants.
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And now, fentanyl, a drug that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, is being added to heroin to cheaply increase its potency. These things would not have happened in a legal drug market, where there is no need to hide the drugs from the police.
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The concentration of illegal drugs varies over time and by dealer.
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This is the reason why close to 100,000 addicts have been dying annually from drug overdoses. They get used a dose based on its weight. But, sometimes, the same amount is more or less concentrated. And when it is more, it is deadly.
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The overdose deaths are not happening because the addicts want to get a stronger high, they happen because illegal drugs have unpredictable concentrations.
BeerDuringProhibition Do a "Find" on the word "beer". IncreasingMarijuanaPotency AddingFentany ChangingDrugConcentration
If these drugs were legal, they would be provided by reputable companies that supply it in bottles with a correct and consistent label of its concentration, just as they do now with all legal drugs.
And this will stop the deaths from overdoses because legal companies can be sued for damages if someone is harmed taking a drug with an incorrect concentration labeling. Good luck surviving in one piece while trying to sue an illegal drug dealer.
It is very difficult to enforce drug prohibition because the users fear to report their dealers to the police. Addicts fear to report drug dealers for two reasons: (a) getting into legal trouble for using an illegal drug and (b) fearing the retribution from the dealer for reporting him. Generally, all laws that try to protect people from themselves are difficult to enforce because the “victims” will not report the crime.
The frustration of the public and police from not being able to stop illegal drug dealing has lead to laws allowing more severe police action often resulting in injury or death to innocent victims.
Selling illegal drugs is very profitable, and disputes among drug dealing gangs cannot be resolved in court. This leads to shootouts over territorial disputes between drug gangs where innocent victims are sometimes killed.
The Solution
There is indisputable evidence that decriminalizing drugs, treating addicts as medical cases and emphasizing harm reduction, drastically reduces the harm done by the drug addiction and can help to reduce it.
This evidence comes from Switzerland's approach to treating drug addiction. This approach is a very constructive move to save thousands of people from death or a horrible life.
This is a brief summary of what Switzerland has done. More details can be found in a Google search of "How Switzerland deals with addictive drugs".
In the early 1990s up to 3,000 drug addicts per day frequented Zurich’s Platzspitz Park, dubbed “needle park”. It was a magnet for Switzerland’s heroin users, whose numbers rose from 3,000 in 1975 to 30,000 in 1992.
This happened under a regime of illegal drug sale suppression and insistence that addicts completely stop using these drugs. And it was associated with a large numbers of overdose deaths, ruined lives and high rates of robberies by the addicts desperate to get money to buy the expensive illegal drugs. Pretty much like it is today in the US and other countries.
Starting in 1992, Switzerland legalized drug consumption and opened supervised consumption rooms where users can inject themselves with substances they bring in, and exchange used needles for clean ones. And the staff helped those unwilling to quit as well as those willing.
By 1994 heroin users could call an all-day staff of mental health professionals, and begin a treatment of two or three weeks of methadone to take home, so they could keep a job.
Seventy percent of heroin addicts in Switzerland are on this therapy. While 8% of patients previously using illegal heroin have chosen a pharmaceutical grade heroin during daily clinic visits.
Most of the people now getting these treatments started using heroin in the 1980’s, before these programs started. There have been very few new heroin users since the 1994, after the programs started. This is because the drug dealers no longer find it profitable to push drugs by giving free samples, knowing that their victims will end up getting them from a clinic rather than from them.
Six months of this treatment costs $1,750, compared to $20,000 for incarceration. And this does not count the cost of police and courts to enforce drug prohibition, and to incarcerate those that steal money to buy the drugs, or the lives saved by the prevention of deaths from overdosing.
In 1997 there was a Swiss referendum to repeal the laws on which the 1994 programs were based, and 70% voted to retain those laws.
The Swiss are known as a conservative, orderly and productive people, with a very decentralized and democratic government. The Cato Institute ranked Switzerland number one in its freedom index for 2022 (US was 23rd), while Freedom House gives it a 96/100 (US got 83/100).
Plus a survey of the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ranked the Swiss as number one, by far, on how much confidence they have in their government.
SwissDemocracy SwissFreedomCato FreedomHouseSwissFreedom SwissConfidencyInGovernment
VI. Libertarian Principles Applied to National Defense
One of our Guiding Libertarian Principles, says: "We are opposed to the first use of force, but relish our right to self defense." And this applies very directly to our foreign and defense policy.
Examples: Three Important Libertarian Positions on National Defense Policy
We Oppose Nation Building and Other Interventions
Just like we want our government to leave our people alone to make their own decisions, we want to leave other nations alone to make their own decisions.
Even when we think that we can do some good by bringing democracy and civil liberties to other nations by intervening in their affairs, that has not worked that way in most cases.
Just look at the failed 10 years of war in Vietnam, and 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Does that look like our leaders knew what they were doing?
Just like people have to learn from their own mistakes, nations too, have to learn from their own mistakes. And having one nation impose anything on another is always resented.
Our leaders have had an exaggerated god-like arrogance to think that they, using our diplomats and armed forces, can reform the traditional culture of entire countries.
We Oppose Stationing Our Troops in Other Countries
The US has about 172 thousand of our military personnel in 178 countries, And some of these are countries with authoritarian governments, like Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Are we defending the governments of these countries?
Enforce Proper Cost Controls on the Military
It is not surprising to see much waste and inefficiency in a military as large as the US armed forces. But our military does not have to be so large if it were not intervening in other countries and stationing troops in almost every country in the world.
And there are some glaring forms of careless management and waste that need to be corrected, if our members of Congress ever prioritize this instead of the location of weapons factories and military bases in their districts. These are the top three:
First, is the problem of failing to successfully pass an annual audit since they were mandated in 2018.
Second, the $330 billion that the Pentagon cannot account for in equipment given to contractors. They are soldiers, not accountants, but this is a symptom of a culture that disregards protecting the property they have been given.
And no military officer has ever been disciplined for either of these problems. There needs to be accountability for this gross waste of resources.
MilitaryAudit MilitaryCannotAccountFor$220Billion
Third, the number of prime US Defense Department contractors in aerospace and defense has dropped from 51 to just 5 since 1993. Their consolidation by mergers was deliberately promoted by the Defense Department, to "strengthen" the contractor base.
As one would expect, this has resulted in higher costs, and frequent dependence on a single contractor that charges outrageous prices. So we have had a government that thinks that reducing business competition is a good thing.
DropInDefenceContractorCompetition ContractorMergersPromotedByDefenseDept
The principal promoter of the defense contractor consolidation was Secretary of Defense William Perry, who started this process in 1993. In a 2015 article in National Defense Magazine he admitted that this action was a mistake. He wrote: "The end result was an unnecessary, undesirable consolidation of the defense industry.”
PerryAdmitsToConsolidationMistake
Nine years have passed since this admission, and nothing has been done about it. How can we undo this consolidation? And who has been penalized for the billions of dollars of higher purchasing costs of military equipment? Oh, I forgot, this is about the government!
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